The hypothalamus is the body’s thermostat. It reads ambient temperature, integrates the signals, and adjusts accordingly. When infection strikes, it raises the core temperature setpoint – a fever. The body’s other temperature sensors then interpret normal conditions as cold. You shiver in a warm room. The response is uncomfortable, but functional: fever helps the immune system fight.
Cold sepsis is different. The thermostat fails. The body stops responding to actual temperature – oblivious. Organ failure progresses from reversible to irreversible while the patient notices nothing. Core temperature drops and no one reaches for a blanket. The absence of shivering is surrender.
The Liberal Party has a thermostat problem.
For almost thirty years, the party has operated as a thermostat rather than a thermometer. It decides what Australian conservatism should be – moderate, economically liberal, socially progressive-adjacent, institutionally respectable – and works to bring the room to that temperature. When the room refuses to comply, the party doesn’t update its setting. It assumes the thermometer is broken.
One Nation is a thermometer. The party is reading the temperature and reporting the number: immigration is too high, energy policy is failing, institutions don’t represent ordinary people, speech is too restricted. This sounds “extreme” only relative to the Liberal thermostat setting. But One Nation is just measuring how hot the room actually is for its constituency.
The January 2026 DemosAU poll found One Nation and the Coalition tied on 23 per cent – the first time a minor party has matched a major party in modern Australian polling. That is a thermometer spike.
The defection maps precisely onto the gap between the Liberal thermostat setting and what the room actually feels like. The voters leaving still hold Liberal values – they’re looking for an institution that does too.
A thermostat doesn’t ask what the room wants. It decides what the room should be and works to make it so. Signals that contradict the setting aren’t information – they’re resistance to be overcome.
This is why the Liberal Party leadership cannot hear voters who want cheaper power and don’t care if it comes from coal, who want to make steel here instead of shipping rocks to China and buying it back, who see their kids locked out of housing while immigration runs at record highs. These are temperature readings the thermostat is filtering out.
This explains why Liberal post-mortems never land. The WA Liberal Party’s 2025 state election review produced 78 recommendations. Every one is operational: campaign structure, digital strategy, fundraising, candidate training, volunteer coordination. Not one asks whether the party’s policy positions match what voters actually want.
The review assumes the product is fine – the problem is packaging. Thermostat logic. Wait. Who’s the mug?
The same pattern explains why Liberal MPs respond to One Nation in terms that baffle their own supporters. When a WA Liberal MLC responds to a One Nation motion on migration by saying “the only assumption a reasonable person could make is that you don’t like all migrants,” he is defending the thermostat setting. The base hears a politician who cannot tell the difference between questioning immigration levels and hating immigrants. Serious people can.
The Liberal Party’s formal credo begins: “We believe in the great human freedoms: to worship, to think, to speak, to choose.” The party that believes in freedom to speak promised to reform section 18C in 2013, abandoned the commitment in 2014, failed to pass even modest changes in 2017, and now watches One Nation campaign on free speech to former Liberal voters.
The pattern applies wherever the party has decided what its members should think rather than listening to what they do think.
Why import people when there aren’t enough houses?
Why restrict law-abiding shooters when criminals don’t follow the rules anyway?
Why do politicians who talk about free speech keep voting to restrict it?
These are thermometer readings.
But party leadership has already set the approved temperature, filtered the contradictions, and diagnosed the losses as communication failures. If the membership runs too hot, current leadership takes a panadol and apologises to the teal constituency for being a bit under the weather.
A feverish party would at least be fighting – misreading the environment, perhaps, but responding to the gap between its setpoint and reality. The Liberal Party shows no such signs. Seventy-eight recommendations and not one on substance. Core temperature dropping and time is running out for Andrew Hastie and his supporters to grab a blanket.
The absence of fever is not the same as health.